Portal 2 Almost Had An Arranged Marriage

Portal 2 was our game of the year for 2012 and it was an undeniably great game that was not only memorable but unique in its humour and wit. It had some strange moments such as GlaDOS becoming a potato but that was light in comparison to what was on the cards at one point during development.

During PAX 2012 in Seattle a few days ago, Valve writers Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw revealed some rather peculiar factoids about their work on Portal and its sequel. Standout amongst them though is the fact that Portal protagonist Chell was planned to marry a turret in the second game.

Chell was supposed to stumble upon a tribe of turrets similar to what you’d expect to find on a seemingly deserted island. She’d end up helping the turrets in some way or another and in return, the giant Animal Turret King would marry one of the turrets off to her. Valve even designed a bridal turret for the occasion and this turret was supposed to follow Chell around for the duration of the game.

Here are some other interesting bits of information from the panel, which focused on writing for video games:

Valve writers start by writing story around the game, not vice versa.

The writers sit in on every voice acting session.

Chet and Erik hate cinematics, and want to keep the player in control as much as possible.

One thing that drives Wolpaw nuts about the first Portal is the line about a test chamber being designed for military androids. The sign on this door shows human stick figures, and Wolpaw wanted to change their heads to be squares to aid the joke.

Erik Wolpaw says Portal has a song during the credits because God Hand, one of his all-time favorite games, did the same thing.

The voice of GlaDOS was originally a text-to-speech program. The software got a lot of laughs, but failed to deliver GlaDOS’s human element near the end of the game. The writers asked actress Ellen McLain to emulate this voice as much as possible. Fortunately she also happened to be a operatic falsetto singer, so she could perform “Still Alive.”

If you want to write for video games, learn how to code. Being able to think like a programmer and learn to work with code makes you a much more valuable in the development process.